Why did I write this? I got challenged by Andy Warren
to write a bit about why I wrote something. I complained to him that he
has some "mechanical" posts on this blog that just mention he wrote
something with some questions, and don't really blog about why he wrote
something. He challenged me to write about why I wrote something, so
here I am.

The idea for this editorial came while watching my wife stress out one day. She's more Type-A than I am, and she really gets caught up in her job. I watched her working frantically, trying to get things done, skipping some of her horse time, working into the night, not excercising, and it reminded me of me. Working too much, thinking you can catch up when you really can't.

I'd talked with my sister-in-law a few weeks before and she was in a similar boat. I tried to tell them both that you have to be able to push back, push the workload down to a manageable level unless things are really important. And since everyone you work for or with will tell you their needs are really important, you need to push back.

The whole idea of constantly running the rat race, being on the treadmill, reminded me of Prometheus.

I wrote this one a few months back, but I've been saving it since it was timeless.

Steve Jones is the editor of SQLServerCentral.com and visits a wide variety of data related topics in his daily editorial. Steve has spent years working as a DBA and general purpose Windows administrator, primarily working with SQL Server since it was ported from Sybase in 1990. You can follow Steve on Twitter at twitter.com/way0utwest